The Marylebone Elm

Dutch elm disease killed around 25 million British elms from the 1960s on, roughly three quarters of the country's population. This one was missed. It stands on the pavement of Marylebone High Street, more than 100 feet of it by the Great Trees of London map, the last elm of its kind in Westminster to have escaped the beetle that carried the fungus through every hedgerow around it. Specialist tree writers identify it as a Huntingdon Elm, a hybrid of wych and field elm. A recent account of the street calls it simply a wych elm, so the exact cultivar is not universally agreed. Nor is the age: writers through the 2010s consistently put it at about 150 years, which makes it roughly 160 now, a figure carried forward rather than measured. It has outlived a church. The small garden beside it, the Memorial Garden of Rest, was laid out in 1951 on the site of the old St Marylebone parish church, which was bombed in the war and then demolished. The building is gone. The tree that grew outside it is still there, leaning out over the pavement as though it means to cross the road. A naturalist photographed it in bud and healthy in 2017, and someone walking the High Street described it still standing there in April 2026.